The Magus.(Paulo Coelho)(Interview)

Paulo Coelho wrote "The Alchemist" in two weeks, in 1987. It is a story, told in "A Thousand and One Nights" and in Rumi's "Masnavi" and later adapted by Jorge Luis Borges--the version that Coelho, who is Brazilian, first read--of a man who dreams that he must leave home to find a treasure and, upon arriving at his destination, discovers that the treasure is in fact buried in his native land. In Coelho's telling, the protagonist is an Andalusian shepherd boy (Coelho says that he is that shepherd boy) who, bedding down with his flock in an abandoned church, dreams of finding a fortune at the Pyramids, in Egypt. He sells his flock and buys a ticket to Tangier, and in the desert meets an alchemist, from whom he learns that "wherever your heart is, that is where you'll find your treasure." When the boy reaches the Pyramids and starts digging, a band of thieves attacks him, even as he explains that he's searching for gold revealed to him in a dream. The thieves leave the boy for dead, and their leader, as a final insult, tells him that he, too, has had a recurring dream about buried treasure--his is in an abandoned church in Spain--but is not so stupid as to have believed it. The boy is overjoyed and returns to the church, where he unearths a chest of gold coins. "The Alchemist" has been translated into sixty-four languages and has sold more than twenty million copies. A movie version, which is expected to go into production next year, will star Laurence Fishburne, who wrote the script and who will also direct, as the alchemist.

Coelho's books include eight novels, two memoirs, several collections of occasional writing, a volume of quotations, and "Warrior of the Light: A Manual," a book of platitudes. They have sold nearly a hundred million copies. Bellboys, waitresses, and policemen recognize his face; in the aftermath of the Monica Lewinsky scandal, President Clinton was photographed carrying a copy of "The Alchemist." In his writings, Coelho, who is Catholic--though he says he does not "kiss the hand of the Pope, that's for sure"--presents himself as a searcher and a sage, a hybrid of Carlos Castaneda and Kahlil Gibran. His cosmology, which includes angels and devils, signs, omens, and, for each person, a destiny called his Personal Legend, promises that whatever is sought--love, money, inspiration--can be readily attained. Quotidian events, like weather and coincidence, he sees as miraculous. Many of his books begin with a prayer to Mary and an epigraph from the Gospel according to Luke. "Eleven Minutes," a novel, published in 2003, about a Brazilian prostitute in Geneva, is an exception in that it also has a "hymn to Isis" found at Nag Hammadi. Santiago Pozo, the owner of a Hollywood marketing firm who is working on an adaptation of "The Valkyries," Coe-lho's memoir of spending forty days in the Mojave Desert, and who describes himself as a "recovering Catholic," says, "The beauty of his writing is his ability to talk to Catholics and Christians but also open the door to a new understanding of divinity." His special talent seems to be his ability to speak to everyone at once. The kind of spirituality he espouses is open to all comers. Its tenets are sayings like "All things are one"; "When you want something, all the universe conspires in helping you to achieve it"; and "The extraordinary is always found in the way of common people." He is a lenient teacher--"It is not a sin to be happy," he writes--and an empathetic one. In the memoirs, and in the introductions to his novels, he emphasizes his own flaws and failures, forgives himself for them, and, by extension, forgives his readers theirs.

Coelho's plots tend to be allegorical, and his readers often say that they see their own lives in his books. His characters, though nominally diverse--a suicidal Slovene in a mental hospital who falls in love ("Veronika Decides to Die"), an orphaned barmaid in a European mountain town whose morals are tested when a stranger comes to town ("The Devil and Miss Prym")--are somehow indeterminate, their nationalities adjectives without great cultural consequence, their struggles universalized. The writing is unadorned and pleasant to read. "It's like music, really, the way that he writes, it's so beautiful," the actress Julia Roberts said in a 2001 television documentary about Coelho. Coelho writes in Portuguese; some literary critics in Brazil joke among themselves that translation must improve his prose. "He writes in a non-literary style, with a message that confirms common sense," Manuel da Costa Pinto, a columnist for Folha de S. Paulo, said. "He gives his readers a recipe for happiness."

Mario Maestri, a history professor at the University of Passo Fundo and one of the few Brazilian critics who does not reflexively dismiss Coelho, has written, "In spite of belonging to different genres, Coelho's narratives and self-help books have the same fundamental effect: of anesthetizing the alienated consciousness through the consoling reaffirmation of conventions and prevailing prejudices. Fascinated by his discoveries, the Coelhist reader explores the familiar, breaks down doors already open, and gets mired in sentimental, tranquilizing, self-centered, conformist, and spellbinding visions of the world that ...